Cataloging an Ancient Burial Site in Northwest Italy

Student Voice

By Rocio Belen Griggs

(April 2019) Hairy, windy roads tuck the town of Erli behind
the ear of the Neva Valley in the region of Liguria in northwest Italy,
where I spent my
first summer as a student in the Master of Science in Modern Human
Anatomy (MSMHA) program at CU Anschutz.

I was immersed in northwestern Italian culture and working at the
archaeological field site of Arma Veirana, 3D scanning the remnants of
an Upper Paleolithic human burial.

The infant frontal bone fragment was light and delicate in my hand, but
weighed heavy in heart and mind alike. Thought to be 11,000 years
old, the tooth enamel caps without roots and the absence of long bone
epiphyses hint that the infant was under three months old. The skeletal
remains were recovered in the cave adorned with decorative shell
pendants, shell beads, and surrounded by lithics (stone tools). It was
clear that the infant was well loved.

The work at Arma Veirana, directed by paleoanthropologists Jamie
Hodgkins, PhD, CU Denver Anthropology, and Caley Orr, PhD,
CU School of Medicine and MSMHA faculty, and their international
collaborators has recovered evidence of Neanderthal occupation dating
older than 50,000 years ago, as well as more recent Homo sapiens from
the Upper Paleolithic period.

Now, as one of only a handful of Paleolithic sites in Europe that
preserve infant remains, Arma Veirana holds great significance because
it illustrates ritualistic burial practices among the last populations of
hunter-gatherers on the continent, prior to the advent of farming and
more sedentary lifestyles.

As an MSMHA student, I was invited to join the archaeological team to
help create the 3D catalog of burial artifacts using the Artec Space Spider
3D Scanner.

At Arma Veirana, the crew uses innovative technologies to record the
artifacts and human remains. Digital surveying equipment logs the exact
coordinates of every artifact in situ. Photogrammetry has been used to
compile thousands of photos into one cohesive 3D image of the entire
site. And finally, 3D scans of the artifacts themselves are taken once
removed from the ground.

In that effort, I became intimately familiar with the Space Spider, a
portable, high-resolution 3D scanner. This scanner is equipped with
three cameras, one texture camera, one regular flash, and six blue-light
LEDs, which together can render a 3D geometrical model with a point
cloud accurate to one hundredth of a millimeter, overlaid with texture
resolution as accurate as one tenth of a millimeter.

Using these scans, we hope to create an open database of our findings
that allows material to be studied from afar. Italian law prohibits artifacts
from leaving the country under most circumstances. The accuracy of the
technology has even allowed us to document the presence of ochre, a
decorative pigmented substance tying these artifacts to ancient cultural
practices. It has also facilitated the production of 3D printed replicas for
study in the lab and to provide a tangible representation of the data the
team hopes to publish soon.

Much remains to be learned about the Arma Veirana infant burial. We
are awaiting DNA results from the bones and other artifacts, higher
resolution radiocarbon dates, and analyses of the culturally significant
pendants and beads, as well as a full digital reconstruction of the
partially crushed cranium. This and other work at Arma Veirana will
provide important information about the archaic and early modern
human inhabitants of southern Europe.

Ultimately, this will contribute to a better understanding of our origins
and evolution as a species. Participating on the Arma Veirana team was
a thrilling experience and I am honored to represent the MS Modern
Human Anatomy program and the greater community of CU Anschutz.

Rocío Belén Griggs is a graduate student in the School of Medicine’s MS
Modern Human Anatomy Class of 2020 and vice president of diversity on
the CU Anschutz Student Senate.​
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